1) yes, they are only visible from the sides. they're also your only way of being seen from the sides. drivers are supposed to look both ways before going into an intersection, and on several occasions, I've seen a cyclist coming from the side because his reflectors picked up glare from my headlights. headlights are more like scoop lights than they are spot lights... they project an awful lot of light outside of the area directly in front of you.
2) they add weight, yes, but 100g of added weight isn't going to slow you down significantly. Unless you're racing at the olympic level, the added weight isn't going to be significantly noticable. and as for drag, it's a non-issue. your tires will produce far more drag, and the reflectors will, generally, be in the dead zone caused by the tires and spokes. while they do have an effect, like the weight, it'll be neglibible unless you're racing at the level where half a second over a 20 mile race means the win.
Most bicycle paths that run near roads are lower in elevation than the roads. It's entirely possible that the drivers in his situation were running with the low beams on, and that due to unfortunate positioning the glare of the lights still hit him. The same thing happens when you're driving in a car and approach a hill... if there's an oncoming car that crests the hill before you do, there will be a point where the headlights, even on low-beam, will shine directly in your eyes. If you're on a country road with no street lighting, you will be blinded.
It's also possible that he just encountered one asshole who didn't bother to turn off his brights. Carry a mirror for that, not a laser... when somebody's following me with his brights on, I turn the rearview mirror to shine them back in his eyes... usually doesn't last more than a few seconds before he either passes me or turns his lights down.
I still think it's a solution without a problem, though. When I drive, I have never had trouble seeing cyclists who use the proper equipment at night. There's laws in this country that require that bikes used at nights have lights on them, and they really do work, when installed properly. Have a red flasher mounted under the seat or on the back of your helmet, have a white light in front, and you've still got the reflectors in your wheels (which are also mandated by law), and a bike is *very* visible at night.
I already named one alternative to Pidgin... one that supports the 2nd line (comment) for MSN names, one that doesn't need me to install a completely new build every time MSN or Yahoo changes their servers around, one that's able to send/receive offline messages for said networks, and one that supports webcams and voice chat. The fact that it has a better graphical interface that's more pleasing to the eye while also being more functional is just icing on the cake.
Seriously. Pidgin is just plain fugly, and lacks a great many features that alternatives have.
I wouldn't hold Pidgin up to the same pedestal as Apache... I use XFCE as my preferred desktop, and went as far as to install parts of KDE so that I could use Kopete over Pidgin. On a Netbook... Pidgin sucks *that* much. Seriously. Try using some of the alternatives, and you'll see how badly designed its interface is, and how limited its features really are.
While some mod is sure to rate this a troll (it isn't), I have to say that IE8 isn't all that bad. I still prefer FF on my laptop, and my netbook is running Linux (an Ubuntu variant), but on my HTPC, I haven't bothered to install anything other than IE8. Said system is rarely used to browse the net, of course, but the experience I have with IE8 is surprisingly not crappy.
I was also saddled with IE8 or IE8 at my last job, and again, it was pretty good. (was laid off a month ago, going back to school in september).
I agree with you in saying that if it weren't for Firefox, MS and others would have stopped upgrading their technology, and we'd still all be pretty well screwed from a security and stability standpoint.
You do realise that there's plenty of times when there have been perfectly good reasons to lie, either by omission, or by outright misleading statements?
At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, perhaps the most blatant example would be the bombing of Coventry. The allies had advance knowledge of the November 14, 1940 bombing raid planned on Coventry, but chose to do nothing about it. They knew that people would die in the raid, (we don't actually know how many, but somewhere between 500-1000 people died), but they chose to let it happen, because any form of evactuation or preparation would have tipped the Germans off that their codes had been broken.
Like it or not, there exist times where it makes tactical and practical sense to suppress information. A more recent example, that is more topical, would be a few years ago when the information that a kidnapped Canadian aid worker was homosexual was suppressed. It was felt that had his captors known he was gay, he would have been executed. Answer? suppress the information. And the act of suppressing the information probably saved his life, as he was released from captivity, unharmed.
I'm pretty sure there was a good reason to suppress this information, too. And you may never know what it was. But to make a blanket statement about Wiki like you do based on information that you don't actually have is asinine, at best. News agencies may exist to publish information, but they also have a moral, ethical, and legal obligation not to publish sometimes.
The real question here, which should be addressed to both Wikipedia and the New York Times is: why censor news regarding this particular kidnapping, when your general policy is the exact opposite, of detailed reporting on every kidnapping case you hear about?
Well, while I'm not sure it's applicable to this incident, I do remember a few years back when news and details about a Canadian aid worker who was kidnapped was kept quiet. In that particular case, it was because he had a husband back home waiting for him... They decided that it was better to suppress the information than risk the taliban beheading him for no reason other than he was gay.
It could also have been because they didn't want him to become a celebrity. They may have felt that he was kidnapped in the hopes of making headlines, and getting publicity for their cause. Deny them that publicity, and eventually they might give up and let him go.
*shrugs* we don't know at the moment, and we may never know, but there's two very good reasons to suppress the information.
I'm just going by what the law books say. Sorry you disagree with them. The law books say that for a distribution to be "to the public" it can't be to a limited network. Also, your analogy doesn't "hold water" for about 600 reasons.
I think his point, though, is that while the distribution is limited to people who can connect to the Limewire network (Gnutella, IIRC), the network itself is available to the public. There's dozens of programs out there which can connect to the network, and the protocols which govern the network are well documented and freely available.
Yes, it's an added step you have to take in order to access the network, but it's by no means restricted or private.
Simply making a product available, however, isn't enough for a copyright infringement case to stick in some parts of the world. Up here in Canada, for example, they have to be able to show that either there's material gain on behalf of the person doing the distributing, or that that person or party is individually responsible for material loss on behalf of the infringed party. Neither would be possible to prove in court, as she does not get paid for files that get downloaded from her computer, and because of the way the network is designed, removing any single source from the network doesn't take the files off the network. She's not the only source, so she can't be individually responsible.
Even *if* they could prove that filesharing is responsible for the dropoff in sales that they're noticing, and not their business practices or their tendency towards signing cookie-cutter crap bands (I was looking through my record collection, and 99% of the bands I listen to these days are independant because they can't get a record company to take a risk by signing them), they still wouldn't be able to tie those losses to the individual person, because that person is not an integral part of the network. They'd have to go after the designers of the network itself, which is what they have been trying to do up here.
Now, I'm not a lawyer. I did pass my LSAT up here in Canada, but my degrees are in Philosophy and Linguistics, so take it with a grain of salt. And the personal attack was inappropriate... but hopefully this will shed some light on his point.
Most battery UPS's upconvert the 12VDC to 120VAC to provide a standard power supply that you can plug anything into. That's because most of them run off standard boat or motorcycle 12V batteries which you can get at your local car parts store. Diesel or Gasoline UPS's are electric generators and usually cost a *lot* more. They make sense for keeping an office building powered, but not for keeping just a computer or thirty up. And that's above and beyond the power losses from transmitting 12V over a distance that you mention.
I can see right away why it'd be cheaper to simply design a system to run off 12V directly and convert to 5V internally, and to having the battery right in that system.... first, you don't have to pay for the electronics in a UPS which convert the battery's 12VDC to 120VAC. Second, you don't lose energy in the form of heat, powering those electronics, and spinning the fans to keep it cool, and energy lost in transmission. A much higher proportion of the battery's power gets used to actually power the computer. The electronics which do the conversion from 12VDC to 5VDC are *much* cheaper, and less power intensive, than electronics that can increase the voltage, let alone converting it to alternating current.
Think of it this way: it's basically a laptop, only without the keyboard, screen, video card, and with 8 memory slots and dual CPUs, and provisioning for two 3.5" hard drives. The system runs directly off the battery, and the power supply just charges the battery.
Also, adding computers to the matrix doesn't reduce the length of time that you get from the UPS. I have a media center PC that's connected to a UPS, for example. The UPS is just running the computer and the sattelite receiver. In that configuration, it lasts about 1h without mains. If I were to plug the TV into it, it'd last about 25m. While you're operating on a *much* larger scale, the same would hold true for a centralized UPS. Each system you add reduces the overall effectiveness of the UPS by reducing the amount of time it can power the works without mains. By putting the battery directly on the server, you can add computers without diminishing this capacity. Your computing capacity in the event of power interruption scales up linearly, rather than hitting diminishing returns and a theoretical maximum limit.
Part of the problem is that they need to find a balance between hardcore gamers and casual gamers. A level like he's describing from MoH would have me, a casual gamer (well, except for Warcrack) saying "fuck this" and finding a different game.
Assuming I'd even pick up the game in the first place, which I probably wouldn't.
The problem is that in order to appeal to the casual gamers, the game has to be easy enough that most hardcore gamers won't touch it. By adding the "demo" mode, they can make parts of the game very challenging, to appeal to the hardcore gamers, but can also give casual gamers the ability to avoid the frustrating and annoying content that presents too much challenge and commitment to keep a casual gamer interested.
Did it occur to you that they could have intentionally allowed such an obscene judgement to happen so that they'd have grounds to attack the RIAA in a retrial?
Now, not only can they argue that the trial is a mistrial due to failing to instruct the jury properly, they can argue that the RIAA's campaign is asking for unconstitutional damages against people, and treads a very thin line when it comes to RICO.
It's also worth mentionning that we're expecting a confidence vote this Friday. It's possible, though unlikely, that the Conservatives won't even be in power after tomorrow, in which case this bill would simply die.
I disagree. They should be, and are, able to refuse service to consistent abusers of the phone system itself.
The problem is the slippery slope. While it's a tired analogy, in this case, it's completely apt... if they can refuse service to consistent abusers of the phone system, how do they define consistent abusers? And what happens when they start making exceptions to that definition, and broadening the rules?
For a utility like the phone service, it makes more sense that they shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to anybody.
This particular case is further complicated because, from conversations with my own telephone company about it, they were using a PBX with spoofed information. They kept finding new ways to connect to the phone network, because people kept finding ways to block them.
It's also worth pointing out that they had expanded their operations into Canada, and had been harrassing Canadians since about February of this year. It's possible that the reason they were caught was because they started breaking international law and treaties that the US has signed with its allies, and not because the US government got millions of complaints about them over several years.
they told me that the manufacturer's warranty (5 years) on my new car (2 months) was about to expire...
I decided to fuck with them, and told them I owned a 2002 Lamborghini Gallardo (the Gallardo, as nice a car as it is, didn't enter production until 2003).... I also kept them on the line for almost an hour being transferred from one "department" to another asking for their corporate mailing address.
y'know.... there was an interview with Alcubierre in the documentary How William Shatner Changed the World where he said that while the math supports the possibility of a warp drive, the energy requirements would be prohibitive. Like... an order of magnitude or two larger than the output of Sol.
Most Universities are classed as cities within the city, with their own by-laws, security forces, and medical/fire services. The school I went to had a population of about 40,000 including staff and post-grad students, and it had its own police, fire, and ambulance services. They can certainly have a rule restricting or prohibiting the use of certain types of network equipment. It's not so much prohibitng you from having wireless connectivity, it's prohibiting you from connecting to the school network with a computer that hasn't been thoroughly vetted since being on the Internet at large.
Of course, if you don't like that, then remove the option to have cable/dsl in your dorm room, and tell users that if they live on campus and want network access, then they have to deal with the network being severely restricted as outlined. My point, however, is that if you want your network to be secure, and you want to allow more than one user on the network, you have to turn it into gestapo-land where users are given specific privileges which are easy to monitor/secure and everything else is prohibited.
Of course, the school could simply implement a firewall that drops anything that isn't on 80 or 443, and redirects those ports through a silent proxy which runs server-side antivirus. Such a setup would actually be pretty trivial to do with BSD, and anybody with the know-how to tunnel through it likely isn't a serious risk to network integrity (I firmly believe that the users who don't know what the hell they're doing are the dangerous ones). I'd still prefer my method, though, as I'd rather the users know they're in gestapo-land. Security through scaring the shit out of everybody.... ^.~
Perhaps the way I'd do it is a bit draconian, but here's how I'd do it if I were running the place:
1. Allow unrestricted network access for peer-to-peer subnets. You have a computer, you can do whatever you want with it, provided you aren't causing grief to other users. As a precaution, require that the computer be vetted as virus-free before it's allowed to connect to the network.
2. Cut that network off from the Internet. Zero access outside the network. Provide IMAP for incoming mail. Require all SMTP traffic to go through the server that you administer. Provide internal mirror servers for keeping Windows and OS/X up to date. (not Linux. but Linux users probably know enough to update manually as soon as they are given a connection to the Internet again.)
3. Set up terminal servers which you control. Can set it up with roaming profiles if you want. All Internet access except for e-mail originates from these systems. Provide users with all the software they need to connect to a terminal server. (VNC as an example, but a University can probably afford a much better solution than that)
4. Set up network shared drives. Your share gets automatically mapped to your roaming profile when you log into a terminal server, and it is accessible via Samba and FTP from the secured network (so you *can* download files, but you have to do it in two steps, the first of which being through a strictly controlled system). Also set up an internal instant messenger server using your preferred service. While there's tons of free services available, I do know from experience that MS Office Communicator server is able to connect to MSN Messenger on the outside world (and presumably Yahoo as well), and can be configured to prevent file transfers and block links.
5. Provide a gaming lab that's completely segregated from the working network, from which students can play online games such as Warcraft and GuildWars, as well as surf freely to sites like YouTube. Allow users to run as users only, and require that all software be installed by an administrator... be liberal. don't restrict people from installing a game, but do restrict people from installing LimeWire or such. And make sure that the gaming machines don't have burners, or external USB ports.
6. Allow students the option of purchasing cable/DSL service from a local provider, but stipulate that if they elect to have this connection in their dorm, their room will be completely disconnected from the secured network. Ban routers that allow wireless connectivity.
round ones for a jeep are easier to get.:) There's been far more jeeps made with round headlights than square ones.
it's the same logic that suggests that you should replace the air suspension in a Subaru XT or XT6 with coils from a Loyale... while you'll lose the ability the XT6 has to drop its ground clearance to 4" (from 8") at speeds over 60mph, you get rid of a system that's finicky and hard to keep maintained, and you greatly increase the pool of available parts to fix it: over its entire 6-year run, only 811 XT6's ever made it to Canada, versus that many loyales, per month, over the same time period. The ratios are about the same in the US, too.
It's pretty certain that the components are not functionning at 1 atmosphere of pressure. Give or take, the rule of thumb when diving is that the pressure goes up by 1 atmosphere for every 10m of depth. With a depth of 11000m, that's 1100 atmospheres of pressure. That's one of the most reliable methods they use to measure depth, actually.
It's not the outside pressure that causes things to crumple. It's the difference between outside and inside pressures. With that in mind, and keeping in mind that electronics don't get decompression illness, I think it'd make more sense to pressurize the sub. Especially considering that it's a lot easier to contain high pressure at the surface than it is to withstand it at the bottom... case in point, I have an aluminum scuba tank sitting in my basement which is pressurized to 3200 PSI. That's over 217 atmospheres of pressure inside the can, a fifth of the way to the pressure at the bottom of the ocean, and it's not even close to the highest pressure scuba tank I've ever seen. (it's about the max pressure you can have with a yoke connector, but a DIN connector can take a significantly higher pressure).
The bottom line, though, is that you can make a sub that can withstand a *much* greater depth by designing/building it to be pressurized on the inside, too.
And there's been manufacturers that made them over the years since then, too. It's doubtful that they'd have had mass appeal if GM had started manufacturing the EV1 10 years ago, because 1) gas was still cheap, and 2) there were still some technological barriers in place. The combonation of those two factors is what prevented the electric car from being manufactured en masse, not GM's decision not to keep making it.
And why are electric cars gaining in popularity today? Because gas has become significantly more expensive, because a greater proportion of the population has become aware of the environmental issues we face today, and the impact our actions are having on it, and because there've been some major breakthroughs in technologies such as batteries that have made building and operating an electric car a more economical proposition.
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Volkswagen makes a model of car called the Rabbit.... what makes you so sure it isn't a car analogy?
I'd put 'em back on....
1) yes, they are only visible from the sides. they're also your only way of being seen from the sides. drivers are supposed to look both ways before going into an intersection, and on several occasions, I've seen a cyclist coming from the side because his reflectors picked up glare from my headlights. headlights are more like scoop lights than they are spot lights... they project an awful lot of light outside of the area directly in front of you.
2) they add weight, yes, but 100g of added weight isn't going to slow you down significantly. Unless you're racing at the olympic level, the added weight isn't going to be significantly noticable. and as for drag, it's a non-issue. your tires will produce far more drag, and the reflectors will, generally, be in the dead zone caused by the tires and spokes. while they do have an effect, like the weight, it'll be neglibible unless you're racing at the level where half a second over a 20 mile race means the win.
No amount of increased visibility will protect you from a driver who's not looking. Much as it sucks.
Most bicycle paths that run near roads are lower in elevation than the roads. It's entirely possible that the drivers in his situation were running with the low beams on, and that due to unfortunate positioning the glare of the lights still hit him. The same thing happens when you're driving in a car and approach a hill... if there's an oncoming car that crests the hill before you do, there will be a point where the headlights, even on low-beam, will shine directly in your eyes. If you're on a country road with no street lighting, you will be blinded.
It's also possible that he just encountered one asshole who didn't bother to turn off his brights. Carry a mirror for that, not a laser... when somebody's following me with his brights on, I turn the rearview mirror to shine them back in his eyes... usually doesn't last more than a few seconds before he either passes me or turns his lights down.
I still think it's a solution without a problem, though. When I drive, I have never had trouble seeing cyclists who use the proper equipment at night. There's laws in this country that require that bikes used at nights have lights on them, and they really do work, when installed properly. Have a red flasher mounted under the seat or on the back of your helmet, have a white light in front, and you've still got the reflectors in your wheels (which are also mandated by law), and a bike is *very* visible at night.
I already named one alternative to Pidgin... one that supports the 2nd line (comment) for MSN names, one that doesn't need me to install a completely new build every time MSN or Yahoo changes their servers around, one that's able to send/receive offline messages for said networks, and one that supports webcams and voice chat. The fact that it has a better graphical interface that's more pleasing to the eye while also being more functional is just icing on the cake.
Seriously. Pidgin is just plain fugly, and lacks a great many features that alternatives have.
which should serve as testimony to how bad and irritating Pidgin is. Said netbook is still quite zippy.
And don't call me "man". I'm not.
I wouldn't hold Pidgin up to the same pedestal as Apache... I use XFCE as my preferred desktop, and went as far as to install parts of KDE so that I could use Kopete over Pidgin. On a Netbook... Pidgin sucks *that* much. Seriously. Try using some of the alternatives, and you'll see how badly designed its interface is, and how limited its features really are.
While some mod is sure to rate this a troll (it isn't), I have to say that IE8 isn't all that bad. I still prefer FF on my laptop, and my netbook is running Linux (an Ubuntu variant), but on my HTPC, I haven't bothered to install anything other than IE8. Said system is rarely used to browse the net, of course, but the experience I have with IE8 is surprisingly not crappy.
I was also saddled with IE8 or IE8 at my last job, and again, it was pretty good. (was laid off a month ago, going back to school in september).
I agree with you in saying that if it weren't for Firefox, MS and others would have stopped upgrading their technology, and we'd still all be pretty well screwed from a security and stability standpoint.
You do realise that there's plenty of times when there have been perfectly good reasons to lie, either by omission, or by outright misleading statements?
At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, perhaps the most blatant example would be the bombing of Coventry. The allies had advance knowledge of the November 14, 1940 bombing raid planned on Coventry, but chose to do nothing about it. They knew that people would die in the raid, (we don't actually know how many, but somewhere between 500-1000 people died), but they chose to let it happen, because any form of evactuation or preparation would have tipped the Germans off that their codes had been broken.
Like it or not, there exist times where it makes tactical and practical sense to suppress information. A more recent example, that is more topical, would be a few years ago when the information that a kidnapped Canadian aid worker was homosexual was suppressed. It was felt that had his captors known he was gay, he would have been executed. Answer? suppress the information. And the act of suppressing the information probably saved his life, as he was released from captivity, unharmed.
I'm pretty sure there was a good reason to suppress this information, too. And you may never know what it was. But to make a blanket statement about Wiki like you do based on information that you don't actually have is asinine, at best. News agencies may exist to publish information, but they also have a moral, ethical, and legal obligation not to publish sometimes.
Well, while I'm not sure it's applicable to this incident, I do remember a few years back when news and details about a Canadian aid worker who was kidnapped was kept quiet. In that particular case, it was because he had a husband back home waiting for him... They decided that it was better to suppress the information than risk the taliban beheading him for no reason other than he was gay.
It could also have been because they didn't want him to become a celebrity. They may have felt that he was kidnapped in the hopes of making headlines, and getting publicity for their cause. Deny them that publicity, and eventually they might give up and let him go.
*shrugs* we don't know at the moment, and we may never know, but there's two very good reasons to suppress the information.
I think his point, though, is that while the distribution is limited to people who can connect to the Limewire network (Gnutella, IIRC), the network itself is available to the public. There's dozens of programs out there which can connect to the network, and the protocols which govern the network are well documented and freely available.
Yes, it's an added step you have to take in order to access the network, but it's by no means restricted or private.
Simply making a product available, however, isn't enough for a copyright infringement case to stick in some parts of the world. Up here in Canada, for example, they have to be able to show that either there's material gain on behalf of the person doing the distributing, or that that person or party is individually responsible for material loss on behalf of the infringed party. Neither would be possible to prove in court, as she does not get paid for files that get downloaded from her computer, and because of the way the network is designed, removing any single source from the network doesn't take the files off the network. She's not the only source, so she can't be individually responsible.
Even *if* they could prove that filesharing is responsible for the dropoff in sales that they're noticing, and not their business practices or their tendency towards signing cookie-cutter crap bands (I was looking through my record collection, and 99% of the bands I listen to these days are independant because they can't get a record company to take a risk by signing them), they still wouldn't be able to tie those losses to the individual person, because that person is not an integral part of the network. They'd have to go after the designers of the network itself, which is what they have been trying to do up here.
Now, I'm not a lawyer. I did pass my LSAT up here in Canada, but my degrees are in Philosophy and Linguistics, so take it with a grain of salt. And the personal attack was inappropriate... but hopefully this will shed some light on his point.
I think he actually means Malicious Prosecution, which is also already covered in the legal systems of most of the world....
Well alright, but I wouldn't think that they'd enjoy techno or house....
Most battery UPS's upconvert the 12VDC to 120VAC to provide a standard power supply that you can plug anything into. That's because most of them run off standard boat or motorcycle 12V batteries which you can get at your local car parts store. Diesel or Gasoline UPS's are electric generators and usually cost a *lot* more. They make sense for keeping an office building powered, but not for keeping just a computer or thirty up. And that's above and beyond the power losses from transmitting 12V over a distance that you mention.
I can see right away why it'd be cheaper to simply design a system to run off 12V directly and convert to 5V internally, and to having the battery right in that system.... first, you don't have to pay for the electronics in a UPS which convert the battery's 12VDC to 120VAC. Second, you don't lose energy in the form of heat, powering those electronics, and spinning the fans to keep it cool, and energy lost in transmission. A much higher proportion of the battery's power gets used to actually power the computer. The electronics which do the conversion from 12VDC to 5VDC are *much* cheaper, and less power intensive, than electronics that can increase the voltage, let alone converting it to alternating current.
Think of it this way: it's basically a laptop, only without the keyboard, screen, video card, and with 8 memory slots and dual CPUs, and provisioning for two 3.5" hard drives. The system runs directly off the battery, and the power supply just charges the battery.
Also, adding computers to the matrix doesn't reduce the length of time that you get from the UPS. I have a media center PC that's connected to a UPS, for example. The UPS is just running the computer and the sattelite receiver. In that configuration, it lasts about 1h without mains. If I were to plug the TV into it, it'd last about 25m. While you're operating on a *much* larger scale, the same would hold true for a centralized UPS. Each system you add reduces the overall effectiveness of the UPS by reducing the amount of time it can power the works without mains. By putting the battery directly on the server, you can add computers without diminishing this capacity. Your computing capacity in the event of power interruption scales up linearly, rather than hitting diminishing returns and a theoretical maximum limit.
Part of the problem is that they need to find a balance between hardcore gamers and casual gamers. A level like he's describing from MoH would have me, a casual gamer (well, except for Warcrack) saying "fuck this" and finding a different game.
Assuming I'd even pick up the game in the first place, which I probably wouldn't.
The problem is that in order to appeal to the casual gamers, the game has to be easy enough that most hardcore gamers won't touch it. By adding the "demo" mode, they can make parts of the game very challenging, to appeal to the hardcore gamers, but can also give casual gamers the ability to avoid the frustrating and annoying content that presents too much challenge and commitment to keep a casual gamer interested.
Did it occur to you that they could have intentionally allowed such an obscene judgement to happen so that they'd have grounds to attack the RIAA in a retrial?
Now, not only can they argue that the trial is a mistrial due to failing to instruct the jury properly, they can argue that the RIAA's campaign is asking for unconstitutional damages against people, and treads a very thin line when it comes to RICO.
It's also worth mentionning that we're expecting a confidence vote this Friday. It's possible, though unlikely, that the Conservatives won't even be in power after tomorrow, in which case this bill would simply die.
The problem is the slippery slope. While it's a tired analogy, in this case, it's completely apt... if they can refuse service to consistent abusers of the phone system, how do they define consistent abusers? And what happens when they start making exceptions to that definition, and broadening the rules?
For a utility like the phone service, it makes more sense that they shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to anybody.
This particular case is further complicated because, from conversations with my own telephone company about it, they were using a PBX with spoofed information. They kept finding new ways to connect to the phone network, because people kept finding ways to block them.
It's also worth pointing out that they had expanded their operations into Canada, and had been harrassing Canadians since about February of this year. It's possible that the reason they were caught was because they started breaking international law and treaties that the US has signed with its allies, and not because the US government got millions of complaints about them over several years.
they told me that the manufacturer's warranty (5 years) on my new car (2 months) was about to expire...
I decided to fuck with them, and told them I owned a 2002 Lamborghini Gallardo (the Gallardo, as nice a car as it is, didn't enter production until 2003).... I also kept them on the line for almost an hour being transferred from one "department" to another asking for their corporate mailing address.
y'know.... there was an interview with Alcubierre in the documentary How William Shatner Changed the World where he said that while the math supports the possibility of a warp drive, the energy requirements would be prohibitive. Like... an order of magnitude or two larger than the output of Sol.
Most Universities are classed as cities within the city, with their own by-laws, security forces, and medical/fire services. The school I went to had a population of about 40,000 including staff and post-grad students, and it had its own police, fire, and ambulance services. They can certainly have a rule restricting or prohibiting the use of certain types of network equipment. It's not so much prohibitng you from having wireless connectivity, it's prohibiting you from connecting to the school network with a computer that hasn't been thoroughly vetted since being on the Internet at large.
Of course, if you don't like that, then remove the option to have cable/dsl in your dorm room, and tell users that if they live on campus and want network access, then they have to deal with the network being severely restricted as outlined. My point, however, is that if you want your network to be secure, and you want to allow more than one user on the network, you have to turn it into gestapo-land where users are given specific privileges which are easy to monitor/secure and everything else is prohibited.
Of course, the school could simply implement a firewall that drops anything that isn't on 80 or 443, and redirects those ports through a silent proxy which runs server-side antivirus. Such a setup would actually be pretty trivial to do with BSD, and anybody with the know-how to tunnel through it likely isn't a serious risk to network integrity (I firmly believe that the users who don't know what the hell they're doing are the dangerous ones). I'd still prefer my method, though, as I'd rather the users know they're in gestapo-land. Security through scaring the shit out of everybody.... ^.~
Perhaps the way I'd do it is a bit draconian, but here's how I'd do it if I were running the place:
1. Allow unrestricted network access for peer-to-peer subnets. You have a computer, you can do whatever you want with it, provided you aren't causing grief to other users. As a precaution, require that the computer be vetted as virus-free before it's allowed to connect to the network.
2. Cut that network off from the Internet. Zero access outside the network. Provide IMAP for incoming mail. Require all SMTP traffic to go through the server that you administer. Provide internal mirror servers for keeping Windows and OS/X up to date. (not Linux. but Linux users probably know enough to update manually as soon as they are given a connection to the Internet again.)
3. Set up terminal servers which you control. Can set it up with roaming profiles if you want. All Internet access except for e-mail originates from these systems. Provide users with all the software they need to connect to a terminal server. (VNC as an example, but a University can probably afford a much better solution than that)
4. Set up network shared drives. Your share gets automatically mapped to your roaming profile when you log into a terminal server, and it is accessible via Samba and FTP from the secured network (so you *can* download files, but you have to do it in two steps, the first of which being through a strictly controlled system). Also set up an internal instant messenger server using your preferred service. While there's tons of free services available, I do know from experience that MS Office Communicator server is able to connect to MSN Messenger on the outside world (and presumably Yahoo as well), and can be configured to prevent file transfers and block links.
5. Provide a gaming lab that's completely segregated from the working network, from which students can play online games such as Warcraft and GuildWars, as well as surf freely to sites like YouTube. Allow users to run as users only, and require that all software be installed by an administrator... be liberal. don't restrict people from installing a game, but do restrict people from installing LimeWire or such. And make sure that the gaming machines don't have burners, or external USB ports.
6. Allow students the option of purchasing cable/DSL service from a local provider, but stipulate that if they elect to have this connection in their dorm, their room will be completely disconnected from the secured network. Ban routers that allow wireless connectivity.
round ones for a jeep are easier to get. :) There's been far more jeeps made with round headlights than square ones.
it's the same logic that suggests that you should replace the air suspension in a Subaru XT or XT6 with coils from a Loyale... while you'll lose the ability the XT6 has to drop its ground clearance to 4" (from 8") at speeds over 60mph, you get rid of a system that's finicky and hard to keep maintained, and you greatly increase the pool of available parts to fix it: over its entire 6-year run, only 811 XT6's ever made it to Canada, versus that many loyales, per month, over the same time period. The ratios are about the same in the US, too.
It's pretty certain that the components are not functionning at 1 atmosphere of pressure. Give or take, the rule of thumb when diving is that the pressure goes up by 1 atmosphere for every 10m of depth. With a depth of 11000m, that's 1100 atmospheres of pressure. That's one of the most reliable methods they use to measure depth, actually.
It's not the outside pressure that causes things to crumple. It's the difference between outside and inside pressures. With that in mind, and keeping in mind that electronics don't get decompression illness, I think it'd make more sense to pressurize the sub. Especially considering that it's a lot easier to contain high pressure at the surface than it is to withstand it at the bottom... case in point, I have an aluminum scuba tank sitting in my basement which is pressurized to 3200 PSI. That's over 217 atmospheres of pressure inside the can, a fifth of the way to the pressure at the bottom of the ocean, and it's not even close to the highest pressure scuba tank I've ever seen. (it's about the max pressure you can have with a yoke connector, but a DIN connector can take a significantly higher pressure).
The bottom line, though, is that you can make a sub that can withstand a *much* greater depth by designing/building it to be pressurized on the inside, too.
We had electric cars 100 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#1830s_to_1900s:_Early_history
And there's been manufacturers that made them over the years since then, too. It's doubtful that they'd have had mass appeal if GM had started manufacturing the EV1 10 years ago, because 1) gas was still cheap, and 2) there were still some technological barriers in place. The combonation of those two factors is what prevented the electric car from being manufactured en masse, not GM's decision not to keep making it.
And why are electric cars gaining in popularity today? Because gas has become significantly more expensive, because a greater proportion of the population has become aware of the environmental issues we face today, and the impact our actions are having on it, and because there've been some major breakthroughs in technologies such as batteries that have made building and operating an electric car a more economical proposition.